


New Leaves

by vass



Category: Curse of Chalion
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-10-02
Updated: 2008-10-02
Packaged: 2017-10-02 01:29:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vass/pseuds/vass
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ingrey and Ijada consider the future.</p>
            </blockquote>





	New Leaves

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Katharos in the Yuletide 2007 Challenge  
> My apologies to people who've actually been through childbirth: Uh, yeah.

_I might now become a father in my turn, and I cannot give such perfect safety. It was always an illusion. Will my own children forgive me, when they find out?_

\- Lois McMaster Bujold, _The Hallowed Hunt_

 

Of course, even after his own weird midwifery, Ingrey was terrified to see Ijada come to childbed.

 

The minor acolyte of the Mother who came to attend Ijada's first delivery would have had Ingrey go, but with a panicked insistence he remained. Ijada, knowing why, and that he was less afraid of her dying than of her dying _in his absence_, suffered him to remain.

 

As his wife's face contorted, Ingrey gave her his hand, and she clutched it while emitting a long, hoarse cry, then subsided, panting.  
"You can rub her belly," the midwife said, _if you must be here_ written on her face. Ingrey did so.

 

It took two hours, and there was never any real danger, in the event. He whispered "Standard-bearer" to her, and "Warrior-maiden," and she dug her fingernails into his arms and left scratches like her leopard.

 

"You're doing very well," the midwife said, with a self-satisfied air. Why Ijada didn't scratch _her_ was more than Ingrey could understand.

 

With both far more, and far less, fuss than Ingrey could have imagined possible, Ijada brought forth a tiny, red scrap of life which cried and cried.

 

"A boy," the midwife said with insulting satisfaction.

Ingrey, who had told himself he longed for a daughter, caught his breath, breathed out again, and said "Ingalef."

Ijada caught his gaze, looked hard at him, then said "So be it."

 

* * *

 

The Daughter of Spring was indeed abundant in Her blessings. Ingrey counted them - Ijada's life, which seemed to him as much a miracle of all the Gods as of any One - and the two infants suckling on his wife. Then he counted their tiny fingers and toes.

 

"What shall we call them?" Ijada asked sleepily.

"There's still time to decide," Ingrey said. He wanted nothing more than to sit here watching his wife and his new son and daughter.

 

* * *

 

Ingalef came back with Carol, Hallana's middle son, having been sent out of the way with him during Ijada's second and most complicated labour. He was excited and anxious to see his new siblings, and had no notion of the danger his mother had faced.

 

Ingrey's heart had seemed to turn to ice in his chest when that cheerful, chaotic divine had arrived unexpectedly to aid Ijada.

 

Indeed, in the end, to Ingrey's uneducated eye there had appeared very little difference between the birth of his first child, and of his second and third. Each time, his brave, dignified, dangerous wife had screamed as though in battle, and clutched his hand as though she would break it.

 

Little difference except the greater redness on Ijada's face, and the tiny frown on Learned Hallana's face, and her disconcerting mutter, just before the first head crowned, of "_Oh_, no you don't!"

 

* * *

 

Ingrey found himself in a polite, married-couple wrangle with Ijada over the naming of their two new offspring.

 

"I had thought you would want to name them after your parents," he said finally, after having tried several variants on those long-dead relatives' names.

 

"You were wrong," Ijada said, tersely.

It occurred to Ingrey then to remember how little Ijada's family had protected her. He had blamed their deaths for that, and failed to wonder whether that failure had been preceded by others, less involuntary.

 

Ingrey turned his thoughts over, and they fell in a new and unlikely direction.

"Beloved," he said, "what would you say to calling the boy Wencel?"

"After _Horseriver_?" she replied, sharp with disbelief.

"No, not the earl," he said, taking her hand, "but the lost boy he subsumed." _And consumed._

 

Ijada looked at him again. "I like it," she said. _Better than naming him for my former kin,_ her eyes added.

 

"For the girl, how about..." he caught himself.

"Have you any plans, then?"

"No, don't interrupt yourself, I like it when you have plans." _Decent ones,_ her eyes sharply implied.

"Fara? I liked her spirit."

"So did I."

 

Fara had thought of them, quite unexpectedly, and sent a silver spoon in honour of Ingalef's birth. The retainer who had brought it, when asked how the Dowager was, had replied with no apparent sense of irony that she was "healthy as a horse." No one had laughed.

 

Apparently, the Hallow-king and his sister had managed to keep that fact from becoming general knowledge. Ingrey knew, though, that Biast's new archdivine had been chosen to hear - had been even lately (interrupted by Hallana's sudden errant out to Ijada's estate) hearing Oswin and Hallana's arguments towards a reexamination of the old forest magics. Change might be coming... was coming, Ingrey could smell it with his wolf nose, crisp and sharp like apples and autumn leaves.

 

"Yes, Fara," Ijada said contentedly. Ingrey did not understand her reticence, her seeming lack of connection with her family, her eagerness to name all three children after people she'd never met, rather than kin.

 

He himself had desperately wished to name their first son after his father; to, if nothing in this world or any other could pull back his father's soul from the mists, still to tie some fragment of his memory to this scrap of new, growing life.

 

He did not understand, but he accepted.

 

* * *

 

"We should put them on a leash," Ijada said.

"Yes," Ingrey said, "and no." He remembered a leash that had once held him fast.

 

They stood together watching, as the twins raced around and wrestled with the two hounds they had been given on their seventh birthday. Ingalef, now nine and very serious, was out riding his new gelding.

 

Ingrey looked at his daughter's quick hands, his son's light hair. _Badger? Horse? Hawk? ...Wolf?_

 

"Do you think...?" he asked - not for the first time, although usually she had been the one to suggest it.

"They're old enough to learn, though not for the deed," Ijada said, a soft fierceness in her tone - more leopard than maternal possessiveness on this occasion, Ingrey thought, used to distinguishing between the two.

 

_Not a leash,_ Ingrey thought, watching his son and daughter, _and no safety either. But, as alive -_ and his gaze turned to his wonderful, fierce, leopardess wife - _as I feel, can I deny them the same joy?_


End file.
